


Black Sheep & Snowball

by SegaBarrett



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, F/M, Interracial Relationship, White Power Organizations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 08:05:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6603235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vern let himself have a choice on his path, once upon a time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Sheep & Snowball

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Oz, and I make no money from this.
> 
> Warning: racism, racial and anti-gay slurs, domestic violence, child abuse - this is Vern's life we're talking about after all
> 
> A/N: I've been working on this story for three years off and on - I tried to give it a read-through to check for continuity, but I probably went wrong somewhere. So hopefully this doesn't suck :P

Vernon Schillinger had come very close to successfully carving the last curve of the "S" in his initials into his desk when the teacher called on him.

"Aha. And Vern. I'm going to pair you with Cassie Desjardins." 

He looked over with a sneer at the girl in question. Cassie was fifteen, he figured - same age as him. But while he had milky beige skin and bright light blue eyes, Cassie had chocolate-brown skin and, well, Vern hadn't ever planned to get close enough to her to give a report on her eye color. He figured they were probably brown. 

Cassie had been in his class for about three years now and he was pretty proud to have not talked to her once. Not that that was even all that unusual - he didn't even talk to the other white kids in his class. When he showed up, he kept to himself or interacted long enough to grab a cigarette and light it and then went about his business. His father had warned him not to draw too much attention to himself, after all.   
They were going to initiate him soon, at least that was what his father had told him. He couldn't wait. He had taken enough of the old man's shit over the years that it was about time that he had something to show for it. He was going to be a man, and everyone was going to live in fear of him. It would be a welcome change from how he felt whenever the old man came home smelling like a damn brewery and beating the shit out of his mom and him. Maybe when he was initiated the fucker would leave the two of them alone. Or maybe he would make him.

He didn’t have time for this partnered-project shit, especially not with some girl from an inferior race. But his father had told him to go along to get along for now and that he’d better not hear any more reports that Vern was mouthing off. He was fucked. Maybe if he explained why… But he couldn’t take the chance. He’d just have to half-ass this and maybe get the girl to do most of the work. If she even could.

The expression on Cassie’s face when their partnership was announced seemed to equal Vern’s own. Shock first, then annoyance followed by disgust. What was she so high-and-mighty about?, he wondered. She should have been honored just to even be allowed to go to the same school as him.

He scoffed. Things were gonna change for him, and soon. Soon he wouldn’t have to take any of this shit from anybody.

There was a long pause as the teacher, in a voice that seemed like it was from far-off somehow, told them to get together with their partners. Vern told himself that he sure as hell wasn’t moving. He stared at his desk, letting the “VS” speak to him. He carved another little angular mark into the “S”. 

There was a light touch against his shoulders and he jerked up his head to see Cassie. He wondered what the hell she was doing there for a moment before he remembered – oh yeah, the project. 

There was a long pause while they looked at each other, before Cassie ventured, “Hey. So, this project. I guess we’d better split up who’s doing what, right?”

“Yeah,” Vern replied, starting to scratch out another design. “Guess we better.”

“So… I was thinking I could do the first half of the chapter. About Thomas Jefferson and everything. And you could do the second half. Is that… okay?” She leaned her head in to look at him and try and get his attention. 

Vern tilted his head back.

“Yeah. Sure. Okay.”

“So… Where do you want to meet? To go over all of this? We, uh, need it done by Tuesday so I was thinking… the library? After class tomorrow?” 

Cassie opened her notebook to a little calendar, some kind of agenda book, and opened to Friday’s page.

“Yeah. Whatever. Sure.”

Cassie sighed.

“Do you say anything other than that?” she prodded. 

He put his Swiss Army Knife down, stopping the carving, and looked at her. 

“No,” he replied after a long pause. She rolled her eyes.

“Okay, well… Library after class tomorrow. Don’t be late.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder and went back to take her seat.

Vern found himself watching her as she did. The girl had spunk, that he had to admit. Too bad it was wasted on her.

He went back to carving something new. A symbol his father had shown him. That would really make the teachers flip their shit one day when they found it. Hopefully, Vern would be graduated by then.

***

Vern thought about a lot of things as he took his spot at a table in the library. First and foremost, he thought about his dad and how that fucker was probably going to give him hell again as soon as he got home. He also wondered if Roy – his only close friend at school, who of course was not in a single one of his classes – was doing anything this weekend. Maybe they could go steal a six-pack of beer and get drunk behind the houses. It was definitely better than staying home, after all.

Where the hell was this bitch, anyway? He rolled his eyes. He didn’t know what the hell that teacher thought he was accomplishing putting the two of them together. Did he think he was gonna create a fucking interracial coalition of peace and wonder? They had to be fooling themselves.

“Hey.” The voice was quiet as Cassie tapped on the desk before slipping in the seat across from him. 

“Hey,” Vern murmured.

“You were supposed to be here forty-five minutes ago,” Cassie commented, “I got up and took out some books in the interim.”

Interim? The fuck kind of vocabulary was she trying out?

“Yeah, well,” Vern snarked, “You people are always late anyway. Figured I’d be right on time to meet you.” He wanted the jibe to hurt, but Cassie looked more disappointed and mildly irked than anything else.

“Okay so,” she started after a few moments, “I was thinking we should probably make some kind of poster. We could get a foamboard and put up different pictures of Thomas Jefferson and different stuff about the Declaration of Independence, so we could have a visual, because just sitting and listening to somebody talk for fifteen minutes can be really boring.”

“If it’s you at least,” Vern grumbled. Cassie rolled her eyes again.

“Oh, and if you need me to buy the foamboard, I can,” she retorted, “Since my family actually has some money.”

Vern bit his lip hard. He wanted to respond, wanted to knock the bitches’ teeth out of her mouth. But if he caused trouble…

_“Vernon, I swear to fucking God, I hear another peep about your bullshit, I will put your head through this fucking wall! I will throw you out on the fucking street, you little cocky piece of shit, I wanna hear that they barely know your fucking name!” Things were flying through the air, Vern’s things._

_“Dad, hold up…” Vern pled, “Listen, calm down, man.”_

_“’Man’! ‘Man!’ I’ll rip the hair right out of your fucking head!” Mr. Schillinger’s hand whipped out and he grabbed Vern roughly before tossing him in the direction of the hallway. “I am so fucking tired of your bullshit! When your mother left I should have tossed you out with that bitch! You fucking waste of space!” He picked up a few of Vern’s notebooks and threw them at him. “If I hear one… more fucking thing Vernon… You are out on the street with the imprint of my foot up your ass. You understand you little cunt?”_

“Yeah. Okay. Foamboard. Sounds fine.” Vern shrugged. “What do you need me to do?”

“Just write up your half, okay, and then we just have to meet somewhere and go over it.”

“Guess we could meet right here,” Vern ventured.

“Yeah. We probably need to meet outside of school though if he wants this done by Tuesday.” She looked at him and paused for a long moment, before saying, “My house is… open, I guess. My parents and my brother Rodney are all in Rhode Island this weekend.”

“You think I want to be seen in your part of town?” Vern retorted. Cassie sighed.

“Well, it’d probably go better than me showing up in your part of town,” she said dryly. “You think I want you sitting on my couch? But… we need to get this stupid thing done so just… Here’s the address.” She wrote it on a slip of paper and handed it to him. “But if your little friends show up and start causing trouble, I’ll know exactly who’s behind it, Vern. And I’m not going to take kindly to it.”

Vern shrugged. He was surprised to find that he didn’t actually want to start any trouble, and he didn’t have all that many friends to start that trouble with, if he really wanted to. 

He just wanted to get this stupid assignment done and go back to flying under the radar, until he graduated. Get his father off his ass, get initiated, become a man and figure out what he needed to do after then. He didn’t want to spend any more time thinking about stupid Cassie and this project than he had to.

***

It was just past six when Vern knocked on Cassie’s door. It was a nice house, far nicer than the place Vern, his mother and his sister were living in, and he felt a flash of anger at that. How the hell did this girl’s family have this much, when he had so little?

But ranting about it in his head wasn’t going to make the situation any different. He just needed to batten down the hatches, do what he needed to do.

This ridiculous project would just be one little thing that he would never remember years later. Like most of high school. He had to believe that, at least.

The door opened, and instead of the button-up shirt and jeans that Cassie wore to school, she was dressed in a more tight-fitting shirt and a skirt. Vern found himself looking, even though he didn’t want to.

“Hey,” she said, “Come in.” She stepped back before shrugging. “You probably don’t want to be seen around here. Your buddies would talk.”

Vern wanted to argue back, but as he stepped on to the carpet, the fight went out of him. Here, without an audience, real or imagined, he didn’t feel the need for a sarcastic comeback.

The door clicked behind him, and he looked around. There was a tan couch in the corner, and a fireplace with a bunch of photographs on the mantle. Cassie and two adults that Vern assumed must be her parents, and an older boy that must be her brother.

It looked entirely unlike the little rundown apartment Vern was used to, where he and his sister shared one room and his father lived in another, where they could hear the floors rattle and shake when their father was in one of his fits.

But he wasn’t going to think about that right now.

“So… uh… what do your parents do?” Vern asked. He realized that he actually hadn’t the foggiest idea of what black people did with their time. He knew his father could probably come up with a lot of unfavorable suggestions, but as for reality, he didn’t even know where to start.

“My mom’s a lawyer. My dad’s a teacher,” Cassie replied with a shrug. “Why do you care? How about your parents? What do they do?”

Vern looked down at the floor before gazing up and glaring at her.

“My dad does… it depends,” he admitted. 

“It depends?” Cassie countered. “Depends on what?”

Vern shrugged.

“On what’s gotta be done, I guess. Can we just work on this stupid project? I’m tired of looking at your ugly face.”

Cassie laughed and shrugged. 

“All right then. You better pull your weight though. I don’t feel like working on this thing all night. I have things I would rather be doing.”

***

After two hours, they had put together what at least was the semblance of a decent poster, and were ready to call it a night. Cassie had surprised Vern by actually being really good at this kind of stuff, and Vern figured he’d surprised Cassie by not lighting her on fire or something.

There was a long moment when he rose to head back to the door, where he was wondering if he should say something, maybe apologize or something. There was a strange feeling that maybe he kind of liked her… but that couldn’t be for real. Hadn’t his parents always taught him that they should be kept separate, that he was better than them, better than her?

The words fell dead on his lips and he ended up just saying, “See you at school” before he turned to walk back home. 

It was chilly, but not chilly enough for it to have started to snow. Vern liked the snow; when he’d been a little kid sometimes he and Greta had run down the street and scooped up snowballs, throwing them at each other and grinning as they landed. Back then they hadn’t worried about the slick ice coming up underneath them and leading them to fall on their asses – they would have just gotten up again.

He wished it would snow. But maybe it wouldn’t at all this year. It would be just his luck.

Vern made it back to his house, a crumbling one story, two bedroom place off an old road and behind a tree stump overgrown with ivy, probably of the poison variety. He wondered if Greta was home yet; the old man seemed to keep it together more when she was around. He made no such allowances for Vern, considering that he thought Vern should man up and learn how to deal with shit, even if that shit was the old man beating him black and blue.

The boy sucked in a breath and let it out. It wasn’t like he had any other choice.

He made it up the crumbling concrete steps and on to the front porch before turning the knob and sticking his head in, first checking to see if anything was obviously broken. When he found that it wasn’t, he slipped a tentative leg in as well, darting his head from side to side like a watchdog.

No sign of Greta but no sign of the old man either. Maybe he was down at the bar, which equaled good news for now and bad news for later. 

He let out the breath he’d been holding and walked back to the cot he had in the room he and his sister had divided down the middle.

Greta wasn’t home; probably out with her friends. She seemed to make them far more easily than Vern ever had, but that made sense – she was a girl, first of all, and they seemed to have their own ways of doing things, ways that seemed utterly foreign to Vern. Not to mention, she had a sweet, easy-going nature that seemed to make anyone want to be around her. She was her own miniature sun and other people wanted to be in her orbit.

Vern crossed the room to take a seat on the bed. He listened to it creak as it lowered a little bit, and he let out a sigh. There had probably been a day when things were better in his home, but he couldn’t recall it. It seemed as if things had always been this way. When he was eighteen, maybe he could leave this hellhole, branch out on his own and find his own way, start his own family, but even as he hoped for it there was a part of him that was sure he could never truly leave that disaster behind.

His moment of reflection didn’t last for very long before the door opened and then crashed closed so loud that the pictures on the wall shook. There were a few photographs of Vern and Greta, but they were all from when they were four or five, back when their mother had been around, before whatever had happened to her. Vern had never been able to get a straight answer on whether she’d died or just straight up left, but after it had happened their old man, who had always been mean, had become a hundred times meaner.

Vern turned his head with a frustrating sigh, refusing to betray the fact that his heart was beating considerably faster, the way it always did when this began, when he knew he’d be spending the better part of the night cleaning up the wreckage of this particular rage at the world.

“VERNON! GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE!” a voice, raspy an obviously intoxicated, roared. 

Vern sighed, and tried to rid his back of any and all expression that his father could conceivably frame as backtalk before walking out the door to his bedroom and into the living room.

“Yes, sir?” he inquire.

“You little shit,” his father growled. “What have you been doing? Sitting on your little ass being a little lazy fuck? Where the hell were you? I came home earlier and you weren’t home!”

“I was over somebody’s house doing a thing for school,” Vern murmured in reply, lowering his eyes somewhat. “A poster.”

Vern’s father snorted.

“Oh, now you’re a schoolboy huh? You better have good grades or that lie won’t hold with me, and I’ll tan your ass raw if I catch you in a lie. You understand me boy?” 

Vern shrugged.

“I was working on a poster with some girl from school,” he repeated.

“Oh, a girl! That explains it then! You getting your dick wet boy?” Vern’s father smirked at him, and Vern thought to himself that if he only knew which girl he had been with, he wouldn’t be making a comment like that unless he had a gun to Vern’s head. He wasn’t about to volunteer that information, either.

“No,” Vern said simply. “Just a project.” He started to move away from him, slowly, moving back towards his bedroom. “Permission to be excused, sir?” He blinked his eyes submissively. 

“Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”

Vern looked down and tried not to visibly sigh.

His father looked at him in disgust a moment and shook his head.

“Get out of my sight, you little faggot,” he hissed finally.

When Vern got upstairs and closed his door, he punched his pillow in fury. That asshole – he was going to tear the old man apart one of these days, if it was the last thing he ever did. Call Vernon Schillinger a faggot? He must have been going crazy in the head to keep pushing him that far.

***

The next day, Vern went into school and found himself looking around for Cassie. He didn’t know exactly why, it wasn’t like he liked her or even cared whether she had shown up today or anything. It just seemed like she was a better thing to focus on than the teacher or the stuff that his asshole father had said to him.

He looked down and started carving his name into the desk again. That seemed to be his most regular hobby these days; he probably had marked up most of the desks in the school at one point or another.   
It was better than thinking about Cassie. Why was he thinking about Cassie? Did he just go around looking for trouble? The girl didn’t mean anything, nothing at all. She was just a mildly pretty face who hadn’t been too bad to look at for a couple hours while doing this stupid project. If he made the mistake of looking any deeper into it than that, he was going to get distracted from everything he was trying to do.  
Everything he needed to do to get his father the hell off his back, get the drunk old man to respect him or at least shut the fuck up around him. 

“Hi Vern.” When he looked up, whoever had spoken was gone, and Cassie had taken her spot at her desk. Had it been her, or had he just imagined it? Why did he even care? He needed to get the girl out of his head, especially if she was making him hallucinate or something like that.

Not only that, but what reason would Cassie have to say hi to him? Didn’t she know he had a reputation to maintain? Not only that, but she didn’t even like him. Why would she want to talk to him?

That only left the possibility that he had made it up in his head. He needed to get his head together, keep it all on track. If he didn’t, he was going to fall apart, and that could mean he was as good as dead.

***

“Cassie!” 

The words came out of Vern’s mouth before he had thought about what he was even saying. He was making his way down the path through the woods that led to his house, and he’d spotted the back of her head, her hair tied in a ponytail.

She turned around, looked at him, and with a sigh turned back around.

“What do you want, Vern?” she said while looking ahead.

“Well, you don’t need to act like that about it,” Vern grumbled in response, thinking that he would just ignore her and hang back if she wanted to be such a bitch about it. Instead, however, he broke into a run and started rushing to catch up with her.

“Oh look,” she said when he was in step with her, “You’re here. Why are you here, Vern? Come to say something nasty?”

“Oh, okay!” Vern shot back. “You just assume that I’m here to say something like that to you, huh?”

Cassie stopped walking and crossed her arms.

“I’m not pulling it out of nowhere, Vern, so stop acting offended. You aren’t some innocent little babe. Everyone knows what kind of a person you are and the kind of stuff you believe. I know not too many people are happy about, oh what is it they say, ‘my kind’ being allowed at this school these days, but most people can keep it to themselves. You gotta shout it from the rooftops like being a hateful ass is a badge of honor.”

“You don’t know anything about me, you got it?” Vern hissed, but it had lost a lot of the threat behind it by the time it came out of his mouth. What if she was right? After all, it wasn’t like he had that many friends at school, even of the people who seemed to agree with his family on the whole integration thing. Maybe they thought his own particular brand of it was too much or something. 

“Sounds like I hit a nerve.” Cassie whirled back around. “So why don’t you leave me alone?” She smirked. “Unless you’re after some brown sugar or something? In which case…” She turned up her nose. “You can get lost, because I’m not somebody’s experiment.”

“Did I say that? Do you always have to finish everybody’s sentences like you know what they’re gonna say? God, you’re the most impossible, most, most…”

“Uppity?” Cassie supplied with a smirk, turning back towards him again. “Don’t know my place? Actually, I do, and it’s anywhere…”

“Would you please shut up?!” Vern yelled. “I was going to say… I wasn’t going to say any of that so if you’d just let me talk that would be neat!”

Cassie sighed and threw her hands down.

“Okay, okay. But whatever you’re about to say, it better be good.”

“I was just going to say… You’re not that bad, you know? I mean, I don’t like a whole lot of people. So I don’t just mean for being a… you know, but I mean… As a person. You’re not half bad.”  
Vern turned and walked away.

***

The next day, he was carving something new into the wood of the desk. Today, he was thinking of turning over a new leaf. He’d break away from his father once and for all, and he was going to be a real man.  
Not that he knew what that even entailed. He pictured it as involving riding around in a truck and going wherever he felt like going, not having to listen to anyone. He wouldn’t stay anywhere, not for very long. It didn’t pay to set down roots anywhere, because that only helped other people to get under your skin. That’s what he had always heard from his father, after all. He’d always cursed the day he’d come to this town, the day he’d gotten married, and the day Vern and Greta had been born.

Otherwise, to hear Vern’s father tell it, he would be the richest man alive if he didn’t have a family holding him back. 

“I curse the day I ever got drunk enough to stick it in that whore,” he would say, even if Vern’s mother was nearby. The woman had been brown-haired and beautiful, but always quiet as long as Vern had remembered her. One day she’d taken off in the night. He thought she had come to him and apologized, tried to get him to come with her too, and he’d told her he couldn’t go without Greta… but these days he was sure that was just a fever dream, and that the woman had left them both behind without a second thought.

Vern’s father might not come after his wife, but he would have come after his son and daughter. It would have been seen as the ultimate insult, and there’s no telling what lengths he would have gone to, in order to avenge what he would have claimed to be his honor.

Not that he wanted the children, either one of them. It would be the principle of the matter. 

“You cannot take a man’s children away. They are his property,” he had said time and time again. Some part of Vern had realized that it wasn’t normal, but what could he do about it? Open his mouth and get punched in it? 

Instead, he carved his name into the desk. Just his first name, not that he was even sure he wanted to claim that. Maybe in his new life, he’d get rid of “Schillinger” as well. It wasn’t as if anyone could pronounce it correctly anyway. His voice had been on a loop correcting it all year, to the point that he was about to give up caring about it. It was his father’s bug-a-boo, anyway. His name. 

When he looked up, he noticed that Cassie was glancing in his direction. He felt a flash of anger for a moment – what was she doing, looking at him so that everyone could see?

Then he decided he didn’t care. He sort of liked her, maybe. He just didn’t know how.

Or if it could ever work. Whatever this was, exactly. He didn’t have a name for it. He’d had feelings for girls before, but they hadn’t been like this. It hadn’t been this weird shiver that traveled up and down his spine, as if someone had dunked him in a vat of ice-cold water and shut the lid. 

“Hey,” he mouthed, before looking around to make sure Roy hadn’t spotted him. While Roy’s family wasn’t in the Brotherhood, their opinions put them pretty close to it. That was probably one of the only reasons that Vern’s father didn’t make any nasty comments about them hanging around each other. 

He was Vern’s only friend. Everyone else avoided him, or laughed at him, with his dirty clothes and his dank house. But Roy… there was something there, some kind of blood loyalty that they hadn’t ever talked about but which seemed somehow to have always been there.

Roy would know what to do about Cassie… He could tell him, couldn’t he?

***

“No, no man. There’s no way you are going soft on me now, Vern. I think something is playing with your head, making you think some kind of crazy thoughts.”

Vern kicked a patch of dirt up. He looked down at it, instead of at Roy. 

“I figured,” Vern muttered, “Just too much stress and whatever.”

“Either that, Vern, or you need to get yourself laid. How long has it been?”

Vern looked down, at his fingers. They were all scarred up. The last thing he wanted to admit was that it had been never – no girl had ever gotten close enough to him before to even consider such a thing. It had led his father to threaten that he’d get his son a hooker, one of nice Aryan stock, for his eighteenth birthday. He wished he could protest it to Roy, too, but there weren’t really any secrets from him. He would have known.

“You know the answer to that, Roy,” he said. He could feel his pale cheeks burning.

“Well, that’s the problem! You should have said something, you know. I’ll find you someone. Someone right… Someone white.” He smirked. “You’ve just gone so stir crazy that you’re looking in all the wrong places.” Roy looked out over the distance, scanning the grounds for suitable women. “I personally like blondes myself. You have to make sure you don’t accidentally get mixed up with any wops that way. I made that mistake once and boy, I won’t make that one again. They’re crazy.”

Vern rolled his eyes.

“Oh? They’re crazy? Do tell.”

“This girl just wouldn’t leave me alone. She wanted me to sleep with her all hours of the day. She even came around to my house and was banging on the door and everything. And I tell you, if you get mixed up with Cassie, then that’s a hundred times worse. First of all, your dad will kill you, so you won’t even get to part two. But second of all, y’know how I said wops are crazy? The darker the girl, the crazier the girl. It’s like, scientific, man. It’s proven.”

“Yeah, okay,” Vern replied, but at this point he wasn’t really listening anymore. Instead, he was thinking about Cassie again. Maybe the girl was crazy, but not because of the color of her skin. Maybe she was crazy because she was willing to spend time with him.

It was a risk. But maybe it was a risk worth taking.

Finally he looked at Roy, shrugged, and said “You wouldn’t understand.”

***

“Cassie! Wait up!” 

Vern ran up the dirt road that led away from the school, running so hard he tripped over a branch and nearly fell over. 

Cassie turned around and raised an eyebrow.

“Okay?” she asked. Her eyes looked tired, like she’d been walking for miles and couldn’t find anywhere to rest.

“We should be together.”

She let out a bitter little laugh.

“Come again?” she asked.

“I think… you and me, Cass, we make… I think we make a good team. So I think we should try and… do a thing.”

“Do a thing? That’s what you think you and me would be? A thing? Yeah, a thing all right. A thing that would get us both killed. You think I don’t know who your father is?”

“He wouldn’t care. He doesn’t care what I do,” Vern declared, wishing it was true, knowing that in one way it was. Vern’s father didn’t care what he did, as long as it wasn’t something that would reflect badly on him. For all his abuse and carousing, he cared what people thought of him. He had an image to maintain, and whatever he had to do to maintain it, he would. Even if it required killing his own son, or at the very least disowning him. And then what would Vern do? Make it on his own as a teenage kid? Scoop trash out of trashcans to eat or run some sort of gang? His life sucked, but at least at the moment it was all he had. It wasn’t as if, if he got kicked out, that Cassie would come with him. Or would she?

“Oh, I think he’d care about this, Vern. And what changed, anyway? It wasn’t more than a week ago that you were saying all kinds of nasty things about me and calling me all kinds of nasty names.”

“That was before I got to know you, Cassie.”

“I’m not going to do it.” 

He stared at her.

“What do you mean, you’re not going to do it?”

She turned her body so her back was facing him, then turned her head to look at him once more.

“I’m not going to risk everything, risk my family and everyone just to be with someone I barely know. And I do like you, Vern, don’t get me wrong, but… we’re kids. Not to mention, Rodney would completely flip out if he saw me with you.”

“Your brother?” Somehow Vern hadn’t managed to quite picture Cassie’s entire family, her own little solar system, even as he thought back and could somehow place the kid. He’d seen him, hadn’t he? Tall and thin and without a care in the world. He did exist.

“Yeah. A year older.”

“I’d fight him,” Vern told her, walking up closer, putting his mouth near her neck. He wanted to kiss her.

“I never asked you to,” Cassie said. She reached out and pushed him away. “Just leave me alone, Vern. Whatever you think we are… We’re just not. Go back to hating me.”

She turned and ran off into the woods. He could hear branches cracking in the distance, could hear birds singing. It was like they were mocking him, saying that they had more freedom than he did, than they did. That they could fly away.

***

“Hey, asshole!”

Vern awoke the next morning to the sound of the door slamming and his father standing over him, growing at him. For one terrifying moment, he was sure that he knew, that he was somehow all-knowing and all-seeing. That was how he had seen his father, once, when he had been younger, before the wool had been pulled off of his eyes and he had realized that no one in his life really knew much of anything.   
Now, he was afraid again, though. The suddenness, the frenzy of it all. 

“What?” he asked, opening his eyes wide. 

“When I tell you to do something, boy, I expect you to do it!” Vern’s father’s face was snarling at him with unrestrained hatred. Somewhere in the background he heard Greta trying to talk sense to him. She had always believed there was a way out, hadn’t she? Vern wondered what the hell she would make of him and Cassie. She’d probably either tell Vern that he’d lost his mind, too, or somehow she’d be all for it, telling him to break away from this place once and for all, even if there was hope. It just wasn’t worse it, was it?

“What did I not do?” Vern asked. Just the man’s voice was setting his teeth on edge, and he found himself wishing that he was bigger, that he was a hundred feet tall, that he was like Godzilla and could throw this whole house into the next state. 

“I told you to clean!” Vern’s father raged. “I told you to clean your room! I’ve got a woman coming over and I don’t want her to think I’ve raised a bunch of slobs!”

“A woman?” Greta’s voice wafted over to him, small and calculated, as if trying to formulate a chemical solution without something exploding. 

“Yeah. Do you have a problem with that?” he kicked a box over, and Greta backed up, pressing herself against the wall. “I’m going to get laid! Do you two pieces of shit want to ruin that for me, too? Ever since you’ve been born, all I ever hear from you two is want, want, want! You don’t ever ask what you can do to help me!”

“We shouldn’t have to.” The words were out of Vern’s mouth before he’d had time to think about it, and he immediately regretted saying them. “We’re your kids.”

Vern didn’t even see it coming before he was picking himself out of the window, and the window out of himself.

***

“Vern!” 

Vern had tried to ignore Cassie, he really had. After she had told him it would never work, he felt no need to add insult to injury right about now. The injury part of the equation was taking over a good portion of his mind, currently – there were slits up and down his arms and he was pretty sure that everyone saw. No one had said anything so far, but it seemed that Cassie was about to break his streak.

Finally, he whirled his head around and snapped at her, “What?”

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked, “You look like you climbed inside of a blender and turned it on.”

“It was a fight. Not like you’d know anything about that. Then again – maybe you would, given what neighborhood you probably come from.”

Cassie rolled her eyes.

“Seems like that’s your first defense. Someone gets in close and you need to say something nasty, so that you can try to push them back away. Well, nice try, Vernon, but it won’t work with me. Plus, Vern, you’ve been to my neighborhood. You’ve been in my home. Can’t say the same for you, can I?”

Vern didn’t have anything to say about it, and the idea of any girl, but especially Cassie, seeing his rundown home filled him with fear and self-loathing. There wasn’t much of a way to push it aside, save for one – he wrapped his arms around Cassie’s neck and pulled her in, kissing her as if he was drowning.

He thought she would pull away, that she would shove him or yell something or have a rude comeback. It wasn’t like he thought he was good at it. But they stayed locked in each other’s lips for a long while, until Vern felt a flash of panic that someone would come see them, and then… what would happen then? He’d have to explain? He could handle that – or better yet, refusing to explain and cursing someone half to death or beating them, but if they told his father then… then he was in for it for good this time, and there would be no coming back from it.

“I need to go,” Vern mumbled, not able to look at the girl who had just given him his first kiss.

“Yeah,” Cassie murmured, “You probably should.” Vern couldn’t tell whether she was mad, or maybe sad, or maybe both. Maybe she was nothing.

She should be nothing, nothing to him at least.

He was playing with fire, and he didn’t even know why – maybe all he wanted was to get burned.

***

“Look who’s quieter than usual. What, did you forget how to speak?”

Vern looked up to glare daggers at his sister.

“What? I’m busy. I’m trying to study.”

“Yeah, studying real hard, Vern. You’ve been staring at the same page for a half an hour.”

Vern glared at her. 

“What the hell? If you want to be in someone’s business, go find somebody else to bother! I don’t even care.”

“If you don’t care, why are you getting so angry? I’m just trying to figure out why you’ve been acting so weird. You usually always have something to say, something rude – and I don’t even care that you’re not, because I’m glad not to have to hear you complaining. But you are my big brother and I figure that I owe you at least asking about why you’re in a snit…”

“Just shut up, Greta… Maybe I don’t feel like talking to you about it!”

She let out a sigh.

“Didn’t you use to talk about everything to me, once upon a time? We’re supposed to be brother and sister! We’re all we’ve got. I promise, you know I won’t say anything if it’s a secret…”

“Okay, okay!” Vern snapped. “You don’t need to keep winding me up about it. You never shut up. Okay, so I don’t know why I’m even telling you this, but I think there’s a girl I like.”

“Ooooh!” Greta declared, giving Vern a little punch in the arm. “Is she blind?”

“No!” Vern snapped. “You’re a bitch, you know that? A real grade A bitch.”

“At least I get an A,” Greta shot back, sticking her tongue out. “But no – tell me about her. Why do you like her? Does she like you? Ooh, do I know her!”

“No!” Vern said back, too quickly. He wasn’t sure if Greta knew her or not, but it would be better if she didn’t – then he could tell her anything and he wouldn’t have to worry about her opening her big mouth. Then again, it wasn’t like she would tattle to their dad. Who could she even tell?

And he did need advice from someone… someone who was not Roy.

“She’s not blind. Her name is Cassie and she…” He wanted to say something like “she’s a great girl” but found himself not knowing what that would even mean. What did “great” mean? How did people even figure out who they liked, who they were attracted to or wanted to be with? Was there some sort of checklist out there, and did Cassie meet some kind of criteria he hadn’t even known he had? “Her name is Cassie and uh…”

“Cassie what? I mean, I figure I know most of the people in your grade. I’ve dated some guys from your grade even,” she said proudly. “Not Roy, though, he’s disgusting…”

“Cassie Desjardins,” Vern blurted out, before he could stop himself.

Greta stared at him.

“You’ve got to mean somebody else, I mean that Cassie is… oh my God! You like a black girl!” 

Whatever reaction Vern had expected, this wasn’t it – Greta’s eyes had lit up in some kind of bizarre glee, though whether malicious or genuine he wasn’t entirely sure. “Dad would flip out!”

“Yeah, I know, so why don’t you keep your voice down before the whole neighborhood hears? Jesus, Greta.”

To her credit, she did lower her voice.

“What are you going to do, Vern? What are you going to do?”

He didn’t know.

***

Vern wasn’t entirely sure how they had gotten here. They were in Cassie’s backyard, up in a tree house. Things had happened, they’d walked from school – he was pretty sure, at least, and could conjure up a few tiny images to support that – but it had all been a blur, meaningless background noise.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he was mumbling, and at some point shirts had come off; he felt wood, the wood that formed the floor of the tree house. They were hidden from view… enough, at least.

They could never be completely safe.

“I don’t care,” Cassie hissed back. “You’re the one who wanted to do this. You’re the one who can’t leave me alone…”

His hands were in her shirt, yanking it around and then off.

“You can’t leave me alone, either. Otherwise you would have already. Otherwise you’d be with…” He trailed off.

“Shut up.” She mashed their lips together. Everything was a blur after that, a beautiful, clear white blur. Like snowfall.

***

It became a routine, but a wondering routine. Like clockwork, like birds chirping when Vern woke up in the morning. At some point they stopped talking about how they shouldn’t be doing these things and simply continued to do them.

Simply continued to fall deeper and deeper into each other’s eyes and to whisper things they didn’t have control over.

Greta had long since stopped asking Vern where he ran away to at night and continued to cover for him. 

Cassie mentioned once or twice that her brother asked after her, tried to get inside her head but always failed; she kept Vern locked up tight, she told him.

“Where I’m the only one who has the key.”

It was a beautiful thing. A beautiful, tragic thing.

***  
“Get up, Vern.”

Vern was still half asleep, dreaming of Cassie. Dreaming of going far from here and starting a new life, of having a white picket fence and never having to listen to his father’s drunken rantings ever again.

The only problem with dreams is that eventually one must wake up from them.

He opened his eyes and found himself staring at furious, drunken ones.

“Get up,” Vern’s father said again, this time grabbing him by the shirt and throwing him over the side of the bed. Vern could hear Greta yelling in the background, trying to tell him to leave him alone. “You’ve wasted enough time! You’re getting initiated this week!”

Vern stared up at him, and he felt far away. He was floating, almost, but he caught the words he knew he needed to hear – he would need to kill someone by the end of the week. That was how he would be initiated.

He needed to kill a black someone.

***

He’d tell Cassie to get out of town, to lie low maybe. (Her parents would have to leave too, he reminded himself, but maybe they could just start over, or go visit with some relatives. Then he wouldn’t have to think about how this was his fault.) Then he could figure out how he was going to get out of this. Maybe he’d get out of town too; it wasn’t as if his father had ever cared much about him either way. He had only ever been another chip in his father’s corner, so that he could say he had a son, too, when he got into bar fights.

It wasn’t even worth it. He would fly away. Maybe they would fly away together.

He just needed to slip away.

He came to her house and threw rocks at her window in the middle of the night, thought about stories he’d read where people knocked on doors and read love poems to the people they wanted to be with forever.

He hated those stories, the ones they always read in school. They always felt like lies upon lies, meant to make people believe things that just weren’t true in real life.

Cassie slipped out the door and looked at him – her eyes were wide and afraid. 

That was who he was now, after all. Who he was supposed to be. He was supposed to be the kind of man who came and found people like Cassie in the middle of the night. Who didn’t throw stones to serenade but threw rocks to light crosses on fire.

He could see himself becoming it and he blinked, trying to chase it away. 

Maybe there was another way, though.

“You can’t be here! My parents will freak out… My brother…”

“You need to get out of here! You should come with me – we can start over, we can… You can’t be here. My father wants me to join… to join up.” Vern’s mouth snapped shut. He didn’t know what to do or what to say; just a month ago he had been a completely different person, hadn’t he? What would that person have done here? And in another month, he would be yet another person.

But would he be in the Aryans? Or would he be with Cassie?

He felt a strange quiver, a sense of uncertainty that he didn’t know what to call.

The idea of hurting someone, really hurting someone, clenched up his heart in a way he wished he could ignore. As much as his father had told him the same things all throughout his life – that there were differences between people, that there were hierarchies he needed to respect and understand and keep in place – every time he thought of those words, he saw Cassie instead.

“Join up with his white power gang?” Cassie asked, putting her head between her hands. “This is crazy… You need to go. I can’t do this.” She shook her head from side to side. “You need to go.”

“You need to come with me!” Vern urged.

“You don’t understand, I can’t do this.”

He reached out and grabbed her arm; he didn’t know exactly why, maybe he thought he could physically pull her away with him. It seemed a viable option, at least – because he didn’t want to be this, he suddenly realized. He didn’t want to be a part of anything his father wanted him to be a part of. He only wanted Cassie.

“Let go of me!” she yelled.

Vern didn’t know when the figure appeared beside him, but suddenly someone was pulling on his arms and punching at him.

He swung his own fists and he was tumbling back, unable to tell who he was hitting but also unable to make himself stop. Somewhere, Cassie was screaming, screaming for him to stop, but he found that nothing was working.

And then he heard a sickening crack.

It stopped him in his tracks, but he wasn’t sure whether he had been hit, or whoever he was fighting.

He looked down to see a body crumpled beneath him, twisted some way that looked wrong. Vern couldn’t stop staring.

“You killed him!” Cassie was shrieking. “You killed my brother! Why? Why? Rodney!”

Her fists were raining down on him, and Vern was staring off into space.

***

“You did it, Vern. You killed one of ‘em. I knew you had it in you. You don’t have time for this jackshit education. It’s time to win a few for the Brotherhood.”

***

Vern Schillinger plucked off a piece of mail from the top of the stack, noticing with surprise that it was addressed to him and had no return address.

It’s not like it could have been good news, after all.

Inside the manila envelope was a clipped newspaper article. A young black man’s face was framed in the photo.

“Cornell Professor Rodney Desjardins gives speech” was the headline.

It was funny how things worked out.

Vern tore up the article and the envelope for good measure.

He’d lost both his sons, after all.


End file.
